Welcome to the community review for 2015-2016 Round 1 of the FDC's annual plan grant process!

We are glad that you are here.

Please note this call to review proposals focuses on one of the four grantmaking programs run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation has a budget this year of $58.5 million, much of which is raised through donations. The Annual Plan Grant program will make up to $6 million in grants this year to movement affiliated organizations for their mission-aligned programs. During this community review period (Template:FDC date/Community review period/2015-2016 round1), the Funds Dissemination Committee invites you to review any or all submitted proposals for this round by examining how they aim to use Wikimedia donation money to further the movement priorities. A list of these proposals follows. You are welcome to engage with other community members, FDC staff, or Wikimedia organizations (also called "entities") in on-wiki discussions about any proposal.

These proposals come from Wikimedia organizations that are requesting Wikimedia movement funds to implement their annual plans. While some proposals are lengthy, all proposals have an overview section that outlines the basic components of each request and the total amount requested in US dollars.

After reviewing a proposal, please post your comments and questions on the Discussion page of the proposal. You can post questions and feedback in your own language, not just in English.

As you read the proposal, you may want to consider some of these questions:

What experience does the organization have that will enable it to implement the proposal?

How realistic are the goals and intentions of the proposal?

How has the community been involved? If this proposal is successful, how will it affect the community?

What impact will the proposed programs have?

What are the areas of work you are most excited about? Which areas sound less promising?

Do you need more information after reading the proposal?

The community's comments and questions help the FDC to make decisions. Your comments and questions are read and reviewed by FDC Staff before FDC Staff compose Staff Proposal Assessments and are also considered directly by the FDC during deliberations. Community comments are essential to review proposals effectively. We expect that the Wikimedia organizations that have submitted these proposals will be able to respond to your comments and questions.

I agree with feedback below. I am also surprised how there is no proposal from Asia Pacific region. Most of the proposal I find are not deserving in true sense.

(Didn't find any specific comment box, so putting it here)

One thing that I have noticed is that the proposals created in this review are turning out to be more favorable to developed countries than developing ones. It is clear that developing countries are having more usage of wikipedia since they require more input of information required for decision making, analysis of data, construction of new innovations. It is also perceived that developing countries have more users than developed ones and are making the full use of wikipedia's vast bundle of information to help gain their knowledge in their respective fields, the main pillar on the basis of which wikipedia was created. The allocation of money on these proposals looks very wasteful. I believe that a new proposal consisting of funds allocated only to certain developing countries and sites related to their usage consisting of a higher amount of money to be created. I have to agree on the fact that developed countries, having a better economies than others, are fully capable of funding their sites respectively and it is highly recommended that they should do so, helping the other lesser developed ones to be able to have more knowledge so they can develop themselves. Wikipedia was created for the users of the world, then why not help them by making it better ? Grammar_Nazi1507

I also object to providing money to the proposals above. Developed countries can and should contribute to Wikipedia with their own resources. This money should reinforce the central infrastructure and help projects in non-developed countries. UsulHiir

Und nun das Ganze noch 'mal, in English: Donations should keep Wikipedia up and running, like server AC(/DC?), ISP fees and so on. We, the users, maintain the content. So, *don't* give money to "super-users", editing things at (their) will (the whole "admin"(content-wise, *not* IT infrastructure-wise) thing stinks). If you do not know, how to throw the money, buy Berkshire Hathaway or gold (I mean it) to save for future needs. I would consider some 10-20% of the available funds to be given to the respective proposals - in proportion to the population base (i.e. Germany should certainly get more than Austria or Israel), but just give them all something, awarding their effort to make a proposal in the first place. BUT: Keep 80-90% back to maintain servers/ISPs etc. in the future. As has been said already, reading the proposals does not incentivate granting future money to an obviously well-doing institution. On non-developed countries: Yes, they might be (or are) in need, but then, spilling and sqandering is also more probable there. No proposal, no money.

Some more aspects:

If arab counties are blocked off Wikipedia (as per comment below), there naturally will be no proposal, hence in this and similar cases (Tibet ;-)) some money from the 10-20% should be allocated.

Also, I admit reading (apart from the German version) always the English entry also, which is (luckily/unfortunately) typically more precise and/or extended. Translation projects from English to ... (not necessarily to German or Mandarin) therefore could be helpful. A first useful indicator should be a list of which articles are requested from some country in a non-mother tongue (usually in English? in Hindi? in Mandarin?): Translate these from English?Hindi?Mandarin? to the local language. Yours, DocMJV

I have to agree with the objections to distributing money to the proposals above. I have not seen a single reason to grant these proposals. Each seems ethnocentric and insular. That seems counterproductive to a global initiative like Wikimedia. Even the ad hoc proposals discussed as part of these comments, each language clamoring for "me first", are counter-productive. Here is my counte-rproposal:

Spend the necessary money on infrastructure, including the improvement of Wiki Markup and related issues.

Place an equal amount in reserve.

Distribute small grants globally to individuals, to encourage participation. Grants do not have to be more than US100-200 dollars; the proposal to give away US1 million to a single individual would, in 80% of the world, lead to that person's death (and I'm not so sure about the other 20%). A small grant to one person in each country or subsection of each country would do far more to encourage participation and content generation than any proposal seen so far.

And finally, stop funding "hackathons" at Noisebridge. Nothing productive has come out of those gab-fests in the past three years, at least. Rev.MikMcAllister (talk) 10:38, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Having read several of the proposals and a lot of the discussion I think it is not possible to judge from frog-view how the money is best spent by allocating it on these proposals. Assuming that WKF has a clear goal, it seems to me, that a very small group (3-7 heads) of highly knowledgeable persons (who know what's going on in which country and are able to think globally and strategically should work together to formulate a strategy for the next 3-8 years. Then decide how the funds have to be distributed, to best further that strategy. IF a country has a highly motivated team with good projects furthering WKF's goal it is not important what language they speak and how large the country is, nor how much is spent within the country and how much is collected there! What do we want to achieve? how do we get there with least time and money? Bonu (talk) 17:06, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Agree It is very challenging for me to discern which projects are most deserving. I think that countries with high english or mandarin penetration should have less funding towards native language wikis as language homogenisation increases globally. Otherwise I would like to see the best investment for posterity.

I think that it would be more useful to allocate certain amount for the benefits of the volunteers who are also struggling and are trying to improve certain projects that require consistent attention such as the translations projects and/or research publications. Geopoet (talk)

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that the funds should not be spent on already well developed wiki projects in privileged nations. The first priority has to be the long term survival of the Wikipedia project as a whole (infrastructure, hosting, staying free of corporate patronage, etc), followed by projects targeting those who currently don't have easy access to encyclopedic information relevant to them. 193.113.135.111 14:42, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

As others have said, use money to pay for servers and related maintenance. If there is excess money (hurray!), use it to pay for a subsequent year’s servers and related maintenance. JDAWiseman (talk) 21:03, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm with JDAWiseman and 193.113.135.111, this money should go towards keeping Wikipedia up and independent. Zekesonxx (talk) 16:04, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

I was expecting that the money requested is used only for server operation and extension. Basically a means that these recurring costs can be paid without advertisements or commercial investors. I cannot find a "proposal" for this. This makes me feel that there was no technical need for my donation in the first place.--Staugsauber (talk) 19:50, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

By giving grants through such discussions, the grants will go to: 1. the one who can voice their point of view the loudest or 2. a developed country where majority of the users come from.

So, we cannot have a consensus on common grounds where everyone concerned is satisfied with the decisions made.

Instead, let Wikipedia grow organically, on its own, and divert the six million dollars to increasing server capacity and day-to-day maintenance of the site. If there is any funds that are left, roll them over to the next year. VedantMadane (talk) 15:52, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

All these proposals are from the developed countries with comparatively much higher internet penetration and Wikipedia presence (of their cities and topics). To help spread the Wikipedia, all of these proposals must be REJECTED and the funds must be instead released to entities in countries where there is less internet density i.e. Asia, India, China, Africa and Latin America e.g. run campaign to educate school and university kids there on how to update Wikipedia and create NEW wikipages on things that are important in their communities but do not yet exist on Wikipedia. Currently, Wikipedia is more like a repository of knowledge of the western world (specially when it comes to the cities, places, history and location-culture-specific topics).
Thanks.Vdhillon (talk) 13:33, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I have to disagree with Vdhillon concerning "countries where there is less internet density", specifically with reference to Latin America. Married to a Brazilian - which constitutes by far the largest of the Latin-American nations - I spend a great deal of time there in towns and cities large and small. For example, Rio de Janeiro, Sâo Paulo and Belo Horizonte, among the former, Guaraparí, Ouro Preito and Sabará among the latter. I can assure the contributor that Internet "density" is as great, possibily even greater, than that of the US and Western Europe and that individual PCs are commonplace, even in primary schools. (Brian Benedetti (talk) 07:56, 26 October 2014 (UTC))

It will be a little difficult to use funds for Wikipedia in China, where it is censored...--Laberkiste (talk) 15:50, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree with the above. All large Wikimedia projects should be self-sustaining. For instance: the German Wikipedia requests 25% of the $6 million, but they should get 0%. There was $1 million donated to Wikimedia Fördergesellschaft and they should use that alone without requesting additional monies from the FDC. English should also be self-sustaining, covering the U.S., U.K., etc. groups. The languages receiving this funding should be smaller projects representing relatively widespread languages which do not have large Wikimedia presences and therefore do not receive many donations. Some good places to start might be Mandarin, Hindi, Bengali, Thai, and other widely spoken Asian languages that represent economies that are not yet post-industrial in nature. Omnibus (talk) 14:00, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure how serious the proposal was, but IF the major Wikipedias should be self-sustaining, that should be a process spanning over a few years instead of suddenly saying "You're on your own" without a warning. /abbedabbtalk 16:13, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

to the extent the chapters are doing things the WMF wants to be done, the WMF might want to fund them, or they might not get done. if you force the chapters to get grants from other funders, then your "influence" with them will be 0, equal to your funding. i've found that you get better results with a kind word and a check, than with just a kind word. i find a profound ignorance of non-profit finance among the community; it's unclear to me what the benefit of this feedback is. we need continuity of organizations, and to stop ideological battles. Slowking4 (talk) 16:46, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Most, if not all, of Wikipedia's servers are in the USA. Why not get servers in other countries? It seems rather silly to keep articles about Argentina or China in the US, while local servers will be able to give information faster, will cost less and will be outside US copyright terms (as Wikilivres is doing). And yes, there is little logic in North America and Europe getting so much. Jose Mathew C (talk) 08:21, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I believe Wikipedia's core mission is to remove ignorance. And I believe that terrorism is caused not by religion but by lack of education. Therefore Wikipedia should incline to develop itself in countries oppressed by war and prejudice. I believe that investing in free access to information and knowledge will guide us into an all-accepting world culture guided by wisdom. By access to information I mean only to such unbiased and objective facts that are allowed by Wikipedia.Kildwyke (talk) 15:00, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Many of these proposals seem like a waste of time. Some involve using traditional forms of marketing to promote the projects when all marketing should be online. Others talk about attracting more contributors when they already have huge numbers. One, the Estonian Wikipedia proposal I'm unsure about as in my experience the vast majority of Estonian-speaking Estonians use the English Wikipedia by default because of the high degree of English language knowledge in the country and the greater depth of the English project. Why are we discussing this? Surely the project with the greater reach will more likely win? Spend the money on server costs and a way of simplifying the Wikitext mess - that's what's stopping people from contributing.--Xania (talk) 17:53, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

To contribute to other languages, people worldwide must learn other languages. Not one single high school in the US teaches a lesser-known language, like Estonian language. Two-year colleges ("community colleges" in the US) offer several languages, not many or all. Four-year colleges/universities in the US offer a few or several languages. The only way to learn Hebrew is attending a Jewish college/university. To learn other languages, a lot of effort is needed. Either a competent teacher with well-spoken language or studying abroad is needed, but either requires a lot of money. Also, which countries accept American dollar for currency trade? How is money paid: in Euros or in Russian rubles? --George Ho (talk) 19:35, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree with the above opinions on that specific language projects, at least major ones, should be self-sustained and our money donated to (global) Wikipedia must be spent on solving overall infrastructure problems and not given out to a specific language's community. Wikipedia servers are slow, Wikipedia markup languages are a mess, Wikipedia's software is buggy, Wikipedia's editing facilities are buggy, slow, and inconvenient, Wikipedia's rendering engine is buggy, Wikipedia lacks research, presentation, and visualization tools -- here is where the global community could benefit from the use of funding: on the core infrastructure and underlying software. Gelbukh (talk) 19:43, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

An exception from the above (here I agree with Kildwyke) is to help to initiate or consolidate Wikipedia communities in countries most suffering from lack of education (and thus most dangerous to others: education is the best weapon against terrorism). Gelbukh (talk) 19:43, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

As to developed specific language communities, Wikipedia Foundation should help them to raise their own funding campaigns: the users should be given an option to donate (perhaps, in percentages) to a specific Wikipedia project OR to the Wikimedia Foundation to be used on the software and infrastructure: say, one would donate 40% to Estonian Wikipedia and 60% to Wikipedia infrastructure. With this, major projects would be self-sustained (and probably there will be many more people willing to donate to Estonian Wikipedia than those who now donate to Wikipedia "in general"). Wikimedia Foundation could still choose to support incipient projects (minor languages in culturally endangered countries). Gelbukh (talk) 19:43, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree with the comments above, these are largely all a waste of time. Donations should be used to improve content and access, forget advertising. We need experts at this point, not kids still learning how to add brackets. As far as I'm concerned, staff should stop focusing on the "paid advocacy" witch hunt (we get it, evil bias, whargarbble), and use this fortune to hire neutral online entities to translate pages, with an urgency. We also need to send a horde of neutral, motivated editors to reform an article rescue squad. Hundreds of salvageable pages are deleted every day because a few inexperienced editors thought they "seemed like advertising," when all that was needed were five minutes of rewording and scrubbing. And the pages most susceptible to "disappearing"? English pages about non-English topics, since the editors doing the deleting don't bother to find backing research in other languages. In case I haven't been clear so far, HIRE TRANSLATORS AND DO REAL TANGIBLE IMPROVEMENT OF CONTENT. HIRE A #4%ING ARMY IF YOU NEED TO. Looking at this community and seeing how many thousands are spent on "research" and bickering over logistics, and how little is spent on content, it's frankly disgusting and embarrassing. Earflaps (talk) 20:20, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree with a lot of what is posted here. Update the servers, interface and rendering, translate more pages, make connections with more expert communities. Just one thought, how about duolingo? I don't know about their prices, but they have a similar mission focused on language learning and translation. How about teaming up with other organizations that want to spread knowledge, like one of the dozens of ask a scientist programs in the US? I think we really need to look at the global mission, and not just fund already mostly developed local missions around the world, especially if they are not doing anything innovative. HeroTrapp (talk) 21:44, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Arabic community has been prevented from forming a chapter on a technicality for years, and as a result we never benefit from this kind of initiative. Internet use is increasing in the Arab world and Wikipedia is frankly missing out.--عبد المؤمن (talk) 23:12, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

To be honest, I am quite afraid that many of those money will be wasted and the results of those above projects can't be counted. If I would be WMF, I would do the following:

create a cultural magazine that publishes under Creative Commons it's text and photos. I am quite sure that it is not hard to find journalists who agree to post under CC license. For example a magazine that makes coverages of museums, monuments, culturally significant buildings, etc but also interviews and biographies of important historians, architects, writers, etc. I think it's doable by spending a modest amount each year (maximum $1 million). The articles and media published in the magazine will be used to add text into Wikipedia articles and it's photos will greatly enrich Wikimedia commons. Start such a magazine in any US state (say for example Washington), and then expand it to other states and then to other countries outside the US, even in the Arab countries. Try to find cultural funds, try to convince governments and businesses in those countries to fund the publication so the publication can grow and expand. Any country needs such cultural magazines and many countries don't have even one such publication. The publication can also attract funds by publishing commercial ads, which, for a magazine is quite ok. Some countries might have cultural funds that can be accessed for such an activity. The magazines in each country should be bilingual with all artilces in english/native language, so it's easier to keep in account their work. So it's easier to start such a magazine in a language that is hard to learn. They can make tops with the most important architects of that country in the 20th century and so on. Even as of today, I can't find such tops in my country, and I find that very frustrating. So the magazine can create lots of "robotic" tasks with such lists that are very important for the culture of that country - and for Wikipedia too. For example, if the most important architect of the country X is Y, then find the books about the person Y, and make a list with them. Now into my mind it pops the w:Observator Cultural publication, which is a literary publication in Romania and is very strong and abundant in information - it's a wealth of knowledge. It is sponsored by a lawyer company named w:ro:Mușat & Asociații. But I would very much like to have a Romanian publication that makes at least one coverage of another museum or important building per week and that is better structured into separate chapters (interviews/biographies/theatre etc).

* also I would start a project where a few photographers will be paid for taking photos for adding to Wikimedia commons: whatever photos are considered useful: animals, plants, buildings, villages, mountains, wildlife, etc. They can create incredibly wonderful thematic albums just like National Geographic or Nature or Discovery does. How much it costs to pay three photographers to start with? There are many articles where there are very few photos or none at all to chose from. Wikimedia should have at least one such photographer!

* Many government have funds for culture and they should be convinced by someone that it's good to sponsor such things - it's good for improving the country's education in the first place. That's how I would spend money and that's what I would try to do if I would be WMF. — Ark25 (talk) 01:36, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

i agree with everything above, the proposals are a waste of resources. i propose the money goes to mediawiki to improve the framework powering wikipedia. it needs a plugin system that is 1 click to install plugins, needs a webmaster/admin/moderator interface, needs methods to insert arbitrary header information so people can easily insert google fonts, their own funky javascript, and external css such as bootstrap to make responsive mobile ready wikis. it needs at least 1 skin that is responsive & mobile ready by default. mediawiki needs a method to have paid content, it needs a method to have group restricted pages. it needs its links spaces converted from _ to - there are many many many little problems with the content management system. it needs to come hardened against spam out of the gate. it needs its caching documentation updated to show which method is preferred, it needs a system to prevent its documentation from regressing. plugins need example wiki sandboxes, and benchmarks to show performance hits, or improvements. it needs a full security audit. any fool can look at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Version <--- this glaring security problem.... i guess you're running nginx, varnish, apache with mod_php 5.3.10, on mariadb 10, with a ton of plugins to give extra attack surface under ubuntu. (probably 12.04) instead of lighting this mountain of $$$ on fire on bs...... i propose you hire daniel robbins full time to work on these very real issues. 666threesixes666 (talk) 02:30, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

I similarly agree that small wikis, especially non-Wikipedias, need more help. I would like us to fund development of a tool for grant review, which shows the scope and language of each funded item. I will comment on the proposals separately on their own pages. Gryllida 05:05, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

If this was the case, Wikimedia India never got much of the money they asked for last year. Others got a lot, but WMIN did not. Let's be a bit realistic here. Developed regions will always get more money. ----Rsrikanth05 (talk) 07:10, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

I totally agree with the suggestions of mr. Rsrikanth05 It is worth deserve for examination. Bhaskaranaidu (talk) 15:29, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

I also have to chime in, agreeing with the general gist of the majority of the comments above. WP needs infrastructure. I still get several database errors per day when I'm editing a lot, and the latency between preview reloads and such when testing templates is maddeningly frustrating. WP needs more robust servers, a more professional MediaWiki development team (it's nice that people volunteer, but depending upon mostly-volunteer labor results is a far-too-slow development cycle), improvements in the parser and the markup language (and its HTML5/CSS3 compliance and completeness, especially an end to the gross abuse of semantic markup like description lists as boldfacing and indentation tags with ";" and ":"), perhaps more legal resources (e.g. a team that can figure out, with test cases if necessary, where some firmer fair use, etc., boundaries are, so we can end this decade+ of truly excessive copyright paranoia), and more. If we fund editors, it should be for content creation (gap filling) and content improvement (mostly neutrality, plus expert attention on technical and academic topics), and translation.

There are very few articles that need to be developed in minority languages; rather, develop them in major languages, especially English (the Internet lingua franca), and fund translation efforts into other language, and source research in other languages to improve them in English and other major languages when when the topics are mostly covered in minority languages, and, yes, to translate from minority to major languages when articles are missing from en.wp, fr.wp, es.wp, de.wp, etc., due to en:w:WP:BIAS. (The example someone gave below of the difference between http://ht.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayiti and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti (and http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha%C3%AFti for that matter, about half-way between the ht and en quality) is a good case in point of why to focus on major-language content development first; the English one is better not because WMF hasn't thrown money at Haitian writers, but because the educated editing pool in the English language, even when you pare it down to editors interested in working on core articles about Haiti, dwarfs that available in Haiti and the not-English-or-French-literate Haitian diaspora, and nothing is going to change that.

That said, the big-language projects do, yes, need to be self-funding, not holding out their hands for the funds up for grabs here. Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure, and padding for the future. WMF does not need to spend all the money it has on hand.

Some additional major staffing expenses are justified, however. I'd like to see the awful administrative and arbitration system overhauled; it's been an interesting experiment, but one that is increasingly failing. Most admin tools should be unbundled, like the template editor bit on en.wp, and serious admin power - to block, ban, edit-protect - vested in the hands of salaried WMF employees with their jobs on the line for abuse of the tools. It's time for Wikipedia to grow up. We are no longer in the "visionary", founding organizational lifecycle phase, and it's time it collectively stopped acting like it is. It needs mature, stable, professional administration.

Next, all this focus on monkeying around with visual editors, typography "refreshes" that are user-hateful, and gee-whiz stuff that seems more aimed at making Wikia sites look "cool" than doing anything useful for WP (and Wiktionary, etc.) editors has been a waste of WMF resources, and lots of them. Every second spent on crap like that instead of fixing core MW parser bugs (or just replacing the parser) is a brick in the wall separating committed editors from encyclopedic productivity. There are virtually no users who can contribute meaningfully, long-term, who cannot handle a source-code-view editor with some practice. Meanwhile, the errors inevitably introduced by "I need it simple, like MS Word" people using visual editors all have to be fixed by experienced editors who could be working on content or other things of import. In this, I disagree with some of the commenters below, who are hot for WYSIWYG editing.

I agree with many commenters below, however, that funding more conferences and the travel involved is very much not why I donate to WMF! The "meatspace" stuff is fun, I'm sure, but it's not central to the mission, and people who love that sort of get-together can help find alternative revenue streams to make it happen.

PS: If WMF has six million dollars to just pretty much throw away on the above kinds of proposals, which are basically just marketing to markets that don't seem ready or likely to "pay off" in encyclopedic output, then the "donate to keep WP ad-free" campaign seems to be <ahem> misleading. If they have cash to burn in this quantity, there is no "WP is going to have to have sponsored ads or it will collapse" idea is just disingenuous.

I am entirely in agreement with SMcCandlish on the issue of having pages created in English (a) either transferred to the pages of other languages where the article does not exist at all or (b) merged with the same topic on a 'non-English' page which may contain far less data or, conversely, a good deal more data already. As this implies, such transactions would be a 'two-way-street' whereby richer local knowledge and detail should be merged with more patchy, or innaccurate English-language articles. If possible the relevant translations should be undertaken by bilingual translators of mother-tongue standard in each of the respective languages and any merging/splicing carefully performed by a native-speaking editor of the received data. In this way, the alleged dominance of 'Anglo-Saxon' Wiki would be disseminated throughout ALL languages/countries where Wikipedia has a presence to the benefit of smaller entities which do not have the personnel nor resources to compile a comprehensive Wiki of their own. In terms of cost, regrettably, I have no notion, but I am confident that the FDC will be able to make a reasonable estimate. In summary, I believe this would create a more joined-up Wikipedia, worldwide, to the benefit of all and the detriment of none. Perhaps the FDC could create a new, adequately-funded budget line for cross-language harmonisation? (Brian Benedetti (talk) 07:56, 26 October 2014 (UTC))

A donation of 6 Million USD in Wikipedia? It might as well go to expenses first for the maintenance of the servers, I.T. personnel and people who are behind in keeping the Wikipedia and its other related sites. Rental of place maybe, etc..Before having the funds decided to be spent in meetings where not everybody here is unable to attend these meetings! - Fowl_vet

Why is this about countries, organisations and languages? Am I the only person who was under the impression that my Wikipedia donations went towards server, networking and related infrastructure, running costs (ie electricity, bandwidth) and enough staff to keep aforementioned infrastructure running? Wikipedia donations should be about setting up the scenario and letting the public create the content, not about marketing Wikipedia to certain nations, languages, organisations. We print the book, people make the encyclopedia. Marketing and conferences shouldn't even come into it. Send the funds wherever Wikipedia needs more server/network capacity, and if there's any left over give it to a charity or save it for next year. 6 million dollars on conferences and leaflets? Shocking. Audigex (talk) 12:51, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Edited to add a title to this section, as it appears to be garnering its own discussion Audigex (talk) 12:50, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

I'd like to second this motion. The server capacity is inadequate, crucial tools do not work properly forcing volunteer developers to spend progressively more of their private time to maintain them or quit altogether. The resignation of Magnus Manske (creator of CatScan2) is one fresh example. Money should be allocated to increase the capacity. --Deinocheirus (talk) 13:41, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

It seems there is little consensus for spending funds, other than to increase resources. I think increasing resources is very important and if it can be worked out, creating tools to help those who want to learn how to use Wikimedia projects would be good. Wpollard (talk) 05:58, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

These proposals are an example of how an organization becomes bureaucratic and bloated and has to invent ways to spend money on itself. What we have is innocent people making donations to "insure Wikipedia remains ad free" and "like a park of the mind" and then WMF spending their donations on auxiliary staff, conferences, meetings, travel, to enact grandiose plans that consistently fail to address or solve, its long term, fundamental problems: archaic appearance, HTML code editing system, loading speed, editor attrition, systemic bias, vandalism and the lack of quality control.--Keithbob (talk) 13:54, 21 October 2014 (UTC).

Bravo on those points Keithbob. Couldn't agree more. I think for 6 million bucks we could probably fund a GUI editing front end that works, and some enhanced technology that might speed up the page loading performance. I'd also ask if we could we also fix the ridiculous admin approval process while we're at it? If you want to know one of the things that leads to editor attrition more than all else, it's bossy admins who behave as though they're here to manage people. A little service-oriented leadership training for some of them might also be a worthwhile investment. Vertium (talk) 02:57, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

This last group of comments make the most sense to me. One major piece of information that is not in the proposal is why are these funds deemed available for spending? $6 million seems like a large amount of a lot of individual donations to throw up for some projects. Where is the perspective budget to help make sense of the larger budgetary decision?

I believe that Wikipedia should be self-sustaining within each region. This is like Democracy to me. People need to be ready to have it, built it, invest in it, fight for it, and own it. Just handing it to them seems out of place. I could see an initial set up in areas that are deemed ready for it, but then it needs to have a self-sustaining plan. There needs to be a demand in the market space, or one soon to follow an initial investment. Push-marketing can just be burning a lot of sacrificial giving. Roll the funds into next year, improve the infrastructure and tools, keep all of it ad free--these are the Wikipedia building blocks. Let the people do the rest just as they have been doing. Alrich44 (talk) 14:37, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

I have to agree with the comments above. If there are funds available the priorities should be:

Making the hardware & software fit for purpose

Inducting new users and encouraging them to stay and make constructive contributions

Improving communications with the community

- a long way behind, more sociological research. For example, a lot of research has been done already on #2. Wikimedia has itself seemed to regard this as a high priority, but has stood down its "Growth Team" that was working on this very area! - Noyster (talk) 12:14, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree with Keithbob:"These proposals are an example of how an organization becomes bureaucratic and bloated and has to invent ways to spend money on itself." I also agree with Alrich44 and Noyster. Also with Audigex :"What is this about countries organizations and languages? 6 million dollars on conferences and leaflets? Shocking". Agreed.Boeotian333 (talk)

I am quite unhappy about these proposals. Here are the reasons:

(nearly) all proposals are from developed countries chapters. I am sure that they are able to raise these money on their own.

proposals from developing countries chapters are missing. I can see old or withdrawn proposals from India, Indonesia or Philippines, i think that in future WMF must give as much as possible methodological support to chapters like these, so they can complete their proposals.

lack of global overlap. Most of the proposals are targeted just to local communities, not to anything that may help all wiki editors and readers (WMD and its software development section is exception).

staff expenses are major part of budget. In most of proposals, staff expenses are 50%+ of proposal expenses. Is hiring staff in developed countries really the way, how WMF want to spend the money ?

Yes, "hiring staff in developed countries [is] really the way, how WMF want to spend the money", though not as a goal in itself. WMF itself spent 19,979,908 $ on wages in 2013-14, see Wikimedia budget; 6 M$ are just breadcrumbs of what WMF spends. Few of WMF wages are paid to people in "underdeveloped" countries. --Nemo 08:00, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

As someone who has donated annually to WMF for years, I assumed (apparently incorrectly) that the money was needed to run the servers, pay for the minimal staff needed to run the foundation, etc. To find out that there is US$6 million that you're now planning to disseminate, I'm absolutely amazed. A country and organization such as DE, UK, NL, IS, etc. should NOT need funds to sustain itself, and if it does, then the donations should come from that country. I agree that if there is extra money, it should be used in the following ways: 1) create a reserve fund for the ongoing maintenance and enhancement of the technology infrastructure necessary to run the wiki. I believe a 2-3 year reserve is required. 2) promote the dissemination of knowledge in the underserved regions (not necessarily on a country-by-country basis) of the planet. There have been a lot of comments above discussing terrorism and other results of poor education. If our mission is to educate and inform, then giving 25% of the money to Germany - one of the best educated countries on the planet - is contrary to our mission and purpose. If these proposals are funded, I shall not donate to WMF again. It's bad enough we waste valuable resources in the wiki maintaining pages of movie characters and fictitious anime, but to spend this kind of money in first-world countries is not only a shame, but borders on unethical. Vertium (talk) 17:02, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

You don't seem to understand that WMF get far more money from the rich European countries than is disseminated back to them. Under the current mechanism almost all money donated globally goes to the the WMF, who then return some of it through these proposals. Johnbod (talk) 01:21, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

And you don't seem to understand that the distribution back to wealthy European countries is not at all in the best interests of the overall project. If knowledge preservation and dissemination is part of our mission, than it is more than appropriate that wealthy countries contribute and those who cannot afford to contribute benefit from that. I couldn't care less whether Germany (or the US or UK or CH or any other contributing country) ever sees a single dollar of return on their contribution for their "pet projects" as it is their responsibility to contribute so others may benefit. The proposals here are a travesty and if I were responsible for the German proposal, I'd be outright embarrassed to ask for 1.5 million dollars - a full 25% of the entire fund available. Vertium (talk) 02:42, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Good point Johnbod. Can you send provide some more informatino for us on this please? Also, this starts to make me wonder, is it possible that charities become inefficient at some point when donations far outweigh need? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Hippypink (talk) 22 October 2014, 16:40 (UTC)

This is a great article on how Wikipedia doesn't need your money at all and is (apparently) just hoarding as much as they can grab [1]. I'm glad that I've never had spare change to donate in the past because they don't need or deserve it. Some guy (talk) 19:05, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

I Agree that it is disconcerting that so much money is going to Wikipedias in rich countries. The Swiss are some of the richest people on the planet yet they're request is for more funds per-capita than anywhere else. That's disturbing and they should really be pressed to justify that kind of a request, especially if it's just going to go towards expanding their existing style of programs. That said, the money should go to rich countries in 2015 because that's where there are the most wikipedians and that's where the organizations which can effectively utilize the funds already exist. What needs to happen now is to make sure that a large amount of the money is used to build partnerships between the Wikipedias in rich countries and those in poor countries. Let the rich countries get the funding in 2015 but make it a requirement that they spend a large amount of it on developing poor country related projects or better yet, poor country wikipedia groups so that they can be the ones to apply for funding the next time around (2016/2017).Monopoly31121993 (talk) 21:38, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

$6 million for pet projects is really crazy. The donors will be very disappointed to learn that WMF misuses their donated money. The pop-up on Wikipeida (top ten website the the world) everytime someone tried to go to Wikipedia kept telling people that WMF needs to have funds to maintaining the systems. It tuned out, WMF doesn't need money after all. The donors will feel like they were scammed. WMF has $6 million to spend on some non-essential pet projects. The donors must wonder how much money WMF is getting this year and whether WMF is a financial responsible organization. It also leads to question the balance sheet of the organization, and compensations to executives and staff. By showing that WMF plans to spend a large amount of money on non-essential items, it could miscategorize WMF to be one of those American corporations with excess under the cover of non-profit. This jeopardizes the credibility of WMF because donors were led to believe that WMF is a lean organization with no excess and mostly functions by volunteers. This grants need to stop and WMF needs to put the money back to be used for future expenses of servers or infrastructure projects to maintain the contents. Z22 (talk) 12:24, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Completely agree, I've always assumed that donations that I've made were going towards absolutely necessary expenses like server maintenance and staff salaries. I understand if there is a budget surplus, but if thats the case, I'd like that surplus to be invested in low risk ways to ensure future financial stability for wikipedia. BUEngineer (talk) 13:17, 22 October 2014 (EST)

Same here. My company has donated large amounts in the past. A reserve fund, better technology, protection from scrapers like Google, and most of all, adding more expert-authored content is really valuable. I find dozens of articles regularly severely lacking on deep and objective information. I will be far, far less likely to donate in the future if these funds are simply given to other rich countries without valid reasons. Even giving to the poorest countries is not the best idea necessarily, since it each situation is unique. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Hippypink (talk) 22 October 2014, 16:33 (UTC)

Um, yes. I found this page immediately after seeing a desperate plea from Jimmy Wales. "If only people the people reading this would donate, we wouldn't be forced to consider selling ads on Wikipedia." "Each year just enough people decide to give." I have had a recurring donation set up in the past, but I see now that WMF has way more money to spare than I do. Phew! I'm assuming the donation campaign will end soon too. --Refried (talk) 23:16, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Even today, Wikipedia is still begging for more donations. The begging is expressed in such a way to lead readers to believe that the money is desperately needed just to get by for another year. As an 8-year editor of Wikipedia which I have been "volunteering" my valuable time each night after work, cutting into my sleeping time, to keep improving the contents, I feel shameful to be part of an organization that appears to the public to be very close to a scammer. WMF needs to change their act fast to fix this problem. Z22 (talk) 03:56, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

I couldn't agree more - nearly a year's running costs being spent on what are essentially small companies with no accountability, as far as I can tell. Why are Wikipedians spending their own salaries paying for others to do... well, we don't really know what they do? Nothing, as far as I can tell. The vast majority of donators assume that Wikipedia desperately needs their support to keep running for another year, yet here we are wasting basically a year's running cost on these organisations. We're already seeing donator apathy as the site seems to be constantly fundraising, yet it appears we could almost half the amount of fundraising required simply by dropping this program. I won't be donating again while this page exists Audigex (talk) 12:56, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

This is absolutely disgusting. Never donating again, if this goes forward. Couldn't have said it better myself: "This is a great article on how Wikipedia doesn't need your money at all and is (apparently) just hoarding as much as they can grab [2]. I'm glad that I've never had spare change to donate in the past because they don't need or deserve it." Here's a great quote from that page: "At the close of its 2012/2013 financial year (ending June 30), the WMF reported $45 million in net assets. (This included $22.2 million in cash and cash equivalents, plus $17.6 million in investments. That year alone, revenue exceeded expenditure by $13 million.) I would estimate that a positive year-end balance of $45 million to $50 million is enough to keep Wikipedia “online and ad-free” for about ten years, based on the simple fact that in 2007/2008, when Wikipedia was already a top-10 website – with a rather larger editing community than today – the WMF got by on annual donations totalling $5 million, a tenth of what it took this year, and an annual expenditure of $3.5 million."AirCombat (talk) 22:10, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

As somone who used to be heavily involved with WMDE, I'd like to respond to some of your criticism above:

A country and organization such as DE, UK, NL, IS, etc. should NOT need funds to sustain itself, and if it does, then the donations should come from that country.

For 2015, WMDE expects to collect a total of 19 Mio EUR donations from German donors. With this proposal, WMDE gets to keep about 18% of that, the remainder goes to the Foundation for use in the United States and other places. If the arrangement was as you propose, i.e. that WMDE should sustain itself, none of the 19 Mio EUR collected in Germany would be available for activities outside of Germany. The process that is taking place here is precisely because what you seem to be proposing should not be happening: the ability of an organization to use Wikimedia donations should not be dependent on its ability to raise them.

I agree that if there is extra money, it should be used in the following ways: 1) create a reserve fund for the ongoing maintenance and enhancement of the technology infrastructure necessary to run the wiki. I believe a 2-3 year reserve is required.

As far as I know, this already exists.

2) promote the dissemination of knowledge in the underserved regions (not necessarily on a country-by-country basis) of the planet. There have been a lot of comments above discussing terrorism and other results of poor education.

That's indeed a good idea, at least in theory. The difficulty is making this work in practice. The Wikimedia Foundation has--in the past--invested significant time, money, and effort in initiatives to build communities in "underserved regions". The results so far have not been great, at least they did not meet expectations. It's unclear to me whether the lack of success was caused by too high expectations, fundamental mistakes in how to approach community building, timing, external cirtcumstances, or any combination thereof. Personally, I'm totally with you that much more attempts need to be made at getting this right, even at the risk of more failures or less than stellar successes.

Either way, the funding process taking place here is open to any Wikimedia organization regardless of where they came from. The ability of the FDC to give out funds to "underserved regions" is entirely a function of whether there's someone local who is organized enough to spend these funds in a sensible manner. Ideally, there would be highly active communities in those regions whose only obstacle to success is financial resources. Alas, that ideal has simply not come to pass yet. Meanwhile, there are 11 organizations applying for funding this round that have working programs that make a difference in their own region. It's entirely sensible to ask, for this round, which of these proposals deserves more or less resources compared to the other proposals. It doesn't make much sense IMO, however, to compare these proposals right now to a fictitious scenario around spending money in "underserved regions".

At the same time, let's open a conversation on how, for future rounds, more effective proposals from "underserved regions" can be solicited. Clearly, past attempts haven't worked too well. I'm not disillusioned enough, however, to give up on that altogether. sebmol? 12:19, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Regardless of how much of the failure in fund dissemination method, who had been getting the money, or how to measure to real impacts of those funds that had already been put into use, still these are "non-core" pet projects. When you have almost 20% of total expenses to be spent on pet projects, you think that the organization is a lean organization? If the total amount for FDC is in the hundreds of thousands rather than in millions, the responses may be different. You can't have it both ways in the two coincided but contradicting campaigns. One is to spend almost 20% of the total expenses on non-core projects with little accountability, and the other is to aggressively begging for more donations for a "small" organization to get by "another year" and beg for a $3 enough for "a cup of coffee for a [poor] programmer". If you have $6 million on non-core initiatives, you have way more than enough money to pay for the coffee of that programmer and his/her family for their entire life 20 times over. So if we don't want to get rid of these pet projects all together, either limit the total funding to a few hundred thousand dollars, or stop the donation campaign for the next 10 years. You can't pretend to be both at the same time. Z22 (talk) 13:15, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I don't know your definition of pet projects, of course. I'm also not sure how the proposals linked on this page qualify as such pet projects. I do know, however, that limiting ourselves to a small set of activities that we define as "core" and leaving everything out is a huge waste: it wastes both the actual ambition of Wikimedia (remember this "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge"?) as well as the public support Wikipedia specifically gets. In your opinion, convincing/lobbying/bullying museums and archives to release all of their content under a free license is a pet project not worth funding. For others, myself included, it's not any less critical than having good software on our servers or a healthy community contributing to the Wikimedia projects.

Now, none of this says anything about the messaging used during fundraising. I don't know where the "a cup of coffee for a poor programmer" metaphor comes from. Was this actually used? Personally, I'd prefer we remain honest in asking for funding by making clear that what people give is to realize the "imagine a world..." line, not just to keep the servers running for another year. sebmol? 13:55, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Trust me, what I put in quotes about WMF being a small oraganization and needing money just to get by another year are what shown on the aggressive donation pop-ups and banners. You can see some old examples from Fundraising 2013. This year, it is even more aggressive by saying that a donation of $3 is just enough for a cup of coffee for a programmer. It was on the donation pop-ups (at least in the US, I don't know about other countries). I should have taken a snapshot of that. The banner made people feel so bad and they would feel a need to contribute a small amount of money so that Wikipedia crews can keep the light on for another year. Here comes this page (linked from the main Wikipedia page), right after the donation is taken, we know that WMF has $6 million ready to be spent on staffing costs of external organizations with non-measurable tasks. That is a total contradiction to the picture painted on the donation banners. Z22 (talk) 03:22, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree. When I donated money to Wikipedia my perception was that the money is needed to run day-to-day activities not to fund projects in developed countries. I think money will be best spent on infrastructure, hiring translators to increase the readership, running awareness campaign in schools and colleges in developing countries teaching them how to update wikipedia, and small amounts can be given to promote individuals who are working hard in regions about which there is little material on wikipedia. Alokagrawal8 (talk) 16:00, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Editors suddenly arriving to attack the donations plans? (proved to be a misunderstanding)[edit]

(See the last comment in this topic: the whole point proved to be a misunderstanding. Gelbukh (talk) 19:35, 25 October 2014 (UTC))

A thread has started attacking the proposal, someone posts a link to an article on Wikipediocracy, an organization not exactly friendly to Wikipedia, and then other editors chime in agreeing, threatening not to donate, etc. Is it a coincidence that these 8 editors (if I've got my count right) are all extremely inexperienced editor with less than 100 edits globally? Most created this month or last month? Only User:Johnbod is a regular editor. Am I too cynical in thinking that this is something organized? Dougweller (talk) 11:01, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

How did you conclude that I am a new editor. Did you check my Wikipedia account with 8 years of history? If you missed mine, could it be possible that you missed many others that they are new and that you alleged to be part of an organized effort? Even if, let's say, they are all new, and also forget about that article, do you still see the merit of their concerns? The $6 million seems to be an outraged amount for pet projects when the coincided donation campaign is still aggressively begging (worse than a commercial ad banner) for more money as if we are running out of money to just go by for another year? Z22 (talk) 12:45, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I checked your global user contributions. You did edit de.wiki in 2005 so you aren't new, but only have a very small number of contributions and almost all of those in the last 2 months. Point still stands. Some people say there's no such thing as coincidence. Dougweller (talk) 21:09, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm against that constant increase of funds as well. I hope beeing active wikipedian (incl. OTRS and Admin) for over ten years is okay? - or is it then, that the old users are blocking changes? :oD - the new are too new and have no clue, the old are stubborn .oO ...SicherlichPost 15:27, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Ah, the global user contributions. Is it possible that you misread the stats on that page because it only shows the last 20 edits on each project? It does not even have a link to retrieve more history. The z22 account on de.wikipedia.org was created before we have the global account so actually the edit in 2005 that you saw was by someone else, so forget about that one. Let's see my en.wikipedia.org and commons.wikimedia.org edits, oh I only have 20 edits on each and all of them are fairly recent. Oh yeah, because the tool just shows only the last 20 edits, not the entire history. What about your Dougweller global contributions which can be seen here? Does it mean that you are a brand new editor too, like you just have the first edit on English Wikipedia today despite that you have 133,329 edits (yeah, it is in gray and a small font, so it is hard to see)? To see the full history, you need to go the contribution page of each of the project, not the gloabl contribution page. So I think it is safe to say that we can put your theory of the coordinated attack into rest.

This actually highlights the fact that our tools are very primitive despite being the top website of the world. A very small portion of the $6 million could have been spent on tool labs to make thing a little easier for all of the editors, old or new. Z22 (talk) 02:56, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Excuse me, but I've got over 6,000 edits and 8 years of working on the project. You'd be correct to point out that I haven't edited de.wiki, the same way that many (most?) non-English speakers don't do many edits to en.wiki. That isn't the point. The point is that I'm a DONATOR to WMF and we have been asked to discuss how the donations collected, which includes my money is to be spent. The number of edits on any given wiki is an woefully inadequate threshold by which to measure someone's ability to contribute reasonable commentary on the existing proposals. I'm truly sorry you feel it's an 'attack' on the proposals, but when you 're about to waste some of my money on a project that doesn't seem valuable to me, my opinion counts, whether you like it or not. Vertium (talk) 22:05, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I am clearly an idiot. I did look at global contributions but not closely enough. I expected to see a longer list, the way en.wiki contributions are, but I now see that looking at the top there is a sentence that says how many contributions you have. I apologise. Dougweller (talk) 14:59, 25 October 2014 (UTC) (added hours after my edit)

My vote: LSJbot-mod development grant for language articles such as Haitian Creole.[1] The "Haiti" page in that language speaks volumes in comparison to the English version. The rest, well, they need all the help they can get. #HaitiRelief? Twillisjr (talk) 18:55, 20 October 2014 (UTC).

I agree wholeheartedly with the comments above. The outreach programs of the chapters are important, but the "heart" of our project is technology, developers and editors. These three areas have not been growing fast enough over the last 5 years. I propose we make funds available ($1 million has a nice PR ring to it) as prize money for the winner of the 2015 WikiCup. Just think of the publicity that will generate. We need to thank our editors and a big prize is one way to let people know their worth (which many donors are keen to recgonize). Perhaps we could also run a WikiDevCup as well to thank the best volunteer developers. Oncenawhile (talk) 18:52, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

This is the best idea. Wikipedia should be rewarding our most valued editors. We need to expand our GA / A-class / FA content, not get new users to make more paltry nonsense stub articles.

That said, I can understand the arguments that first-world countries' efforts should be self-sustaining. I'd like to see the balance of where donations come from versus where they are dispersed. I don't take issue with the national chapters and I particularly support the efforts of the Germans and the Britons. I do not agree with propping up Wikipedia in minority languages like Catalan (or Welsh, Basque, Esperanto, etc). Our movement risks being hijacked by cultural partisans vainly trying to maintain a dying society at the expense of suckers donating money to keep the servers running. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:04, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

I subscribe to the above proposal that editors and article writers must be rewarded in the first place.Wikipedia must be organised on a firm footing as an organisation technology-wise and in human resources.Editors must be screened periodically and listed for future needs.A part of the donations must be kept as a reserve fund to sustain Wikipedia.There is no need to subsidise rich nations from this fund. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by S.RAMAJAYAM (talk) 22 October 2014, 01:44 (UTC)

What?!? Why on earth would we give a MILLION dollars to one editor? Even if they worked 60 hours per week for a year, it wouldn't be worth that much, no matter what they did. And they'd have to be independently wealth already to not work at anything but WP content writing anyway. — SMcCandlish ☺☏¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 08:56, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm entirely in favour of WMF spending money directly on improving content, but the WikiCup is not the way to do it. The Core Contest has a much better focus, but seems to have reached its current limit with about $300 in prizes per round (from memory) and a small number of entrants. Johnbod (talk) 11:04, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

As, Tamil is one of the Classical language among many languages in the world so you will spend at-least 7% for developing this language in Wikipedia.As well as in the world among many peoples this is my suggestion . Vijayganesh.s1996 (talk) 17:34, 20 October 2014 (UTC)vijayganesh.s1996

Why "Tamil" only? There are so many historic as well beautiful languages in the world. Any reason for picking this particular language? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Chaagi (talk) 22 October 2014, 22:24:28 (UTC)

There are so many historic as well beautiful languages in the world. But, Tamil is the only one living Classical language with rich Heritage and Culture.

The state of Maharashtra in India is mostly (but not exclusively) populated by people speaking Marathi regional language (one of the scheduled languages of India). The population of the state as per latest census is 110+ million. Take away 10% of this where the speaker has higher education in English and has for most practical purposes uses it as his or her first language. He/she has difficulty reading Marathi and is even hesitant to be seen speaking Marathi for being seen as a uneducated hick. India has on an average 30%+ illiteracy. If we look at semi-literacy (those who can read but very hesitantly) then we can take the non-reading population to be 50%. Even when we exclude these two extreme groups we are left with 50 million Marathi people who have become literate and have begun to read newspaper and are information hungry. Currently, virtually every Indian (certainly the literate) have a cell phone. In the next 2-3 years as the prices of smart phones plummet we will have most of these people use smart phones with an access to the internet. Marathi Wikipedia will then be their major source of information (assuming they become aware of it and acquire a habit to look it up when faced with any inquiry). The English Wiki will not help them.

Marathi Wiki as of now has 40k+ articles. Its score on Wiki metrics is high. What is needed is an attempt to spread awareness of MrWiki and to increase its authorship. Additional authors can come from the vast senior citizen Marathi population who have the knowledge, the patience and discipline to write articles needed for Wikipedia. They may not be computer literate. Hence help and funds are required to enter their paper written articles in MrWiki. Likewise, students in Marathi schools too can become authors writing on multiple topics. If these two potential groups can be grown then MrWiki will grow at a much more robust pace and will be able to keep growing rapidly to meet the need of its audience.

We need to grow the article count in all Wikipedias. There's nothing magically special about Marathi, and we shouldn't be giving away money for writing articles in any Wikipedia. That's not why these funds were raised. — SMcCandlish ☺☏¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 08:56, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia needs to upgrade the Devanagari script. Though English is a international language it is believed that the sample of words were derived from Sanskrit Devanagari script. For this I recommend that manager of Wikipedia's try to extend the use of Hindi and Nepali language so that most of the people might get the idea too. We should not give priority to only one language in the world but we should make each and every people of the world to know each and every language so that communication in between individuals will get better.Thus, it is my suggestion for disseminating the new fund for development of Devanagari script.Thank You, —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Paciffic100 (talk) 21 October 2014, 00:44 (UTC)

Along with the previous suggestion about Tamil: the coverage of the languages of the subcontinent is sorely lacking. Hindi and Bengali are among the world's largest dozen languages, but are weakly represented, as well as the major languages Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi and the top four Dravidian languages. Other languages of the subcontinent deserve better treatment, and some are lacking any representation. TomS TDotO (talk) 08:02, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Still not a problem to throw piles of money at. Not every issue is solved with cash. — SMcCandlish ☺☏¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 08:56, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree that Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and other languages are grossly underrepresented in terms of article content compared to the large number of speakers. However, I doubt that this is primarily a problem of lack of funding. Editing Wikipedia is still free of charge. Many native speakers of Indian languages seem to prefer to write in the English wikipedia. They should primarily be targeted and motivated to write (also) in their mother tongue. --Furfur (talk) 21:29, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Response to SMcCandlish: "Not every issue is solved with cash?" Um. Cash can really do anything. What if, say, every year, a portion of the unexpected donations were used to develop the article count in a single neglected language (maybe drawn from a hat). English/German pages tend to be the most developed and represent the most volunteer manhours, so it makes the most sense to prioritize translating those into the language in question(and to focus on "featured or good articles" that have reached a state of relative completion, as well as topics like science, geography, and major political figures, as compared to recent singer-songwriters or DJs).

Use a smart standardization for what our translators get in payment (safely on the spectrum between "we're stingy assholes" and "we're suckers," maybe using minimum wage as a base rate and looking at the amount of data added in edit histories). And then the next year if all goes well, pick another neglected language from the hat. Individual chapters could, for example, be obligated by bylaws to dedicate a certain amount of their allocated funds to such a cause. Doubling the article count, maybe even tripling, for a smaller language seems like a immensely valuable direct use of funds to me. Earflaps (talk) 22:22, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Paying for content contribution goes directly against the core principles of Wikipedia as a volunteer project. It is possible to get funds for promoting the idea of contributing, but paying translators directly would be bad for many reasons. First and foremost, it would destroy the volunteer community. Simple scenario: "Why does this guy get paid for translating English POV, not me that have written 20 original articles about my local area?". With your proposal, money would cause more harm than good. — YerpoEh? 08:00, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

"With your proposal, money would cause more harm than good." Again, citation needed. Jealousy between editors is your big fear? No-one will care that someone is being paid to work on pages they themselves have no interest or ability in doing themselves. Most unemployed people aren't resentful of the garbageman's employment. Why? Because if the task is left to volunteers, the trash piles up and up and up and up and up, and we're all left working in a pile of %$&*. And btw, answer me this: what is a better use of USD$2000:

1. Paying for a Israeli college student to travel to Mexico to listen to a conference on how there aren't enough women in Wikipedia. 10:49, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

2. Make it so people reading, say, Marathi can get decent coverage of international politicians/political movements and major current events. Let's lowball it, and say $5-10 can be used to translate decent verbatim stub (translating intro paragraph only, for example), and $40 for the translation of a big beautiful page. That's close to 200 pages seeded, which non-English speaking Marathi contributors (both experienced and inexperienced) could easily build on. Earflaps (talk) 10:50, 25 October 2014 (UTC) 10:49, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

"No-one will care that someone is being paid to work on pages." [citation needed] works both ways. And yes, people will care, because it will (by definition) create a situation where the few paid editors' contributions will be more valuable than contributions of all the rest, regardless of quality.

"Most unemployed people aren't resentful of the garbageman's employment." This example is relevant to our discussion... how?

"what is a better use of USD$2000:" Your examples are incomparable, the outcome depends on many factors.

"Make it so people reading, say, Marathi can get decent coverage of international politicians/political movements and major current events." If it's so important to them, somebody will surely take the effort and volunteer to translate - it's the basic idea of Wikipedia. Funds can be used to improve technical infrastructure to make it easier, they can even organize and ask for money to buy literature, cover travel costs if they occur, etc. But diret contributions? This should not and will not happen - unless the community (Wikimedia as a whole) is prepared to sacrifice the very idea that makes this movement so successful for short-term gain. — YerpoEh? 11:30, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

This very discussion is filled with editors who are paid by Wikipedia to apply their expertise in keeping both the organization and the encyclopedia running. Simply read the picture section below, for a good example. The line is being drawn on which special skills are absolutely necessary and which special skills are not (ie. what tasks are important enough to warrant staff), and I'm not entirely sure who is drawing that line.

And if you're going to quote me, Yerpo, at least have the journalistic integrity to not truncate my words. The garbageman example is me attempting to argue that translating pages for nations without a large amount of contributors, but a large amount of readers (for example, the population supported by the non-online version of Wikipedia int he Swiss proposal), is valuable. I don't buy into the argument that only the languages with active social communities, i.e. their own little bureaucracies, could benefit from an influx of attention and help. (and in case anyone's wondering, I can't translate or manage people for 7%$&, so I would in no way financially benefit from this proposal myself).Earflaps (talk) 12:54, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Simply, the line is being drawn between content creation (volunteers) and assistance with the "meta" part of the business (a handful of professional staff plus volunteers). It's debatable whether all those paid positions are really necessary, but we won't solve that question by giving everybody money.

"journalistic integrity"? I'm not a journalist. And even if I were, your garbageman parable would still not make any sense.

"I don't buy into the argument that only the languages with active social communities... could benefit from an influx of attention and help." And where exactly did I say that? I gave an example of groups, but WMF also provides individual small grants. Just not directly for content creation, because that would be a bad idea for reasons that I explained. — YerpoEh? 13:47, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Well, I'm sorry I don't make sense. If all is fair, your responses don't really make sense to me either, at least not in relation to the points I've been trying to make. I'm surprised; you're a translator, so it makes sense to me you'd be worried about the state of our less organized language Wiki's, and how they are largely neglected by the overall project and mission. This overall discussion is largely oriented around that, and its within only that context that I'm trying to make my points, I'm not advocating throwing money at every dude on Wikiexperts who wants some part-time work. We have wonderful GA and FA articles on essential topics, representing thousands of volunteer manhours, but we don't put in the minimal work required to make those pages accessible to non-English/German/etc. speakers. Earflaps (talk) 14:45, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

If I wasn't clear, I am worried about the state of less organized wikis, but I believe that your proposed solution would make the situation worse for everybody in the long run. — YerpoEh? 15:56, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

I'd like to see no support at all given to any body that hosts advertisements, like WikiHow in the UK, a subsidiary of Wikimedia I believe. A long battle (remember the Spanish Fork!) was fought against the pollution of advertising, although it was suggested by Our Jimmy Himself. There's nothing wrong with advertising per se (or is there?), but it pollutes Wikipedia, which is as we proudlt boast, ad-free. JohnWheater (talk) 11:06, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

wikiHow is not a subsidiary of "Wikimedia". Legoktm (talk) 20:47, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Just a note as "paid advocacy" is becoming a huge issue over here. We don't even know if our articles have been commercialized and most importantly, we cannot know. There's this damn thing called en:Native Advertising which is so coherent with its original form of the platform that we cannot distinguish it from the rest. --Ankit Maity (talk) 13:55, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Address the Developing World by forming partnerships between rich countries and poor countries[edit]

I agree that the "Developing World" has been neglected on Wikipedia and that should be changed. I think radical change is dangerous though and it would be a shame to lose the support of people in rich countries when they're willing and able to help. The proposals here seem to be asking for help (and funds) for Wiki groups in rich countries and that's okay but they should also try to build links with Wikipedia communities in poorer/developing countries and not just in their home communities. Giving Switzerland's Wikipedia 1/2 a million dollars is not a problem (although it's more percapita than most places and it's a very rich country already) but at least part of that should go towards helping the Swiss (and all other rich country groups) establish links with the developing world or at least with Switzerland's population who have knowledge about and links to the developing world (e.g. immigrant populations within rich countries). The only way we'll fix the gap in Wikipedia coverage and not reproduce the same inequality that we see in today's global economic environment is by forming real partnerships between the active and organized wikipedia communities in rich countries and those expanding Wikipedia communities in poor countries. As far as I can see this is still missing from the current approaches provided here and that should be fixed right away. If the goal of the most progressive rich countries today is to provide 1% of their GDP in the form of aid to poor countries why doesn't Wikipedia provide 10% of all its funding to help poor countries develop wikipedia? Again, this could simply be done through partnerships and building networks in rich countries through their respective communities who have links to the developing world.Monopoly31121993 (talk) 21:20, 21 October 2014 (UTC) Bangla wiki should be developed. There is no Wikipedia branch office in Bangladesh.

First, I have not read this entire "Community/Review" page, so I apologize if there is something [important] that I did not know -- when I added this little "comment" [sub-] section -- that (if I had known it), would have caused me to write something differently.

Second, I realize that there might be (see above) some rules or something [e.g. perhaps some deadline that I missed?], that (had I known about them) (sooner) might have made a difference in some way. I am hoping that my idea (see below) can still be considered on its merits, "if any" (vs. "good idea, but we intend to ignore it, as it was submitted too late / in the wrong place / ...etc.")

I have occasionally been helped greatly by being able to use either the en:Wayback Machine web site, or the en:Webcite web site, in connection with a "footnote" that needs (or, that might need, in the future) (respectively!) an "archiveurl" field value. Such an "archiveurl" field value can serve as an emergency backup, to address a situation involving a dead link, or it can be used to anticipate (and preemptively solve) a possible future situation involving a en:Dead link. (respectively!)

Now, I am not involved (other than as a user) with the owners / maintainers of those two web sites, (good! We don't want any "conflict of interest" here!) but it seems from the occasional appeals for money, that en:Webcite could use some help, while (from the lack of such occasional appeals for money), it seems that the en:Wayback Machine has already obtained [assurances of] whatever funding they need. I could be wrong.

Now, I am not suggesting that Wikimedia should get involved in any other way, other than perhaps contributing funds [money], -- "if needed". I am not sure whether having the en:Webciteweb site, and Wikimedia run by completely separate organizations, is the best idea... but in any event, if it is not, then any discussion of any such "alternate" ideas -- (see e.g. [the "proposal" page for] Webcite) -- would be outside the scope of my comments here today.

I am just suggesting that it might be a good idea for Wikimedia to contribute some money (if/when it is needed) to the organization that owns / operates the en:Webciteweb site. ((IMHO, if Webcite did not exist, then someone would have to create it. ...not least, in order to supply the functionality that is needed for preemptively helping with some possible futureen:Dead link, by means of using an "archiveurl" field value.)) ((!))

i agrees with the openion of Monopoly31121993. in wikimedia pojects many undeveloped languages not even had page or projects. while developed languages had lacks of pages in every project. this is a drawback to the multilingual projects like Wiktionary. in my mind Wiktionary is place where you can get information about a word or idea in any language. but now it is limited to some limited languages only. another example- online translation is possible between 20 or thirty languages. from Indian languages only Hindi is there in that list. there are languages which crores of people use (eg. bangali (7th language by speakers) telugu (15th) urdu (21st) and many others [2] are not in the list . so please give attention to think "how we can improve at least the developing languages " by bringing these languages also to the laval will be a develpment to the wikimedia itself--pakalon (talk) (talk) 02:39, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

FDC money basiclly support to vibrant communities in their effort to generates high-volume and and high-quality content. The content is what our readers enyoys, and the content is the reason for them to give donations. And after two years of FDC the imapct to create healthy creative community and high-quality content can now be demonstrated (universitey students creating top-of the-class articles, experts from institutions participating, technically advanced creation of aticles etc). And there is no rationale to see this funding (given by the Board) to be in competition with money going to product developement done by WMF.

Serbia being among the applicants is a good example that less rich countries is as able s richer ones to evolve a vibrant communty and create a viable chapter. We also find other being on this path, like Ukraine and Bangladesh.

So please understand this is not money meant to create communities but to support existing ones.

I can also give you comfort in you focus of less rich countries that both WMFR and WMSE and supporting acitivites in Africa to get communites started. And myslef I am in an early phase of an effort to creatse up to 100000 article on each of the 200 versions, which depends on a very qualified techical bacgroud support, which would had been unable for me to get without chapters and their technical experts. I have started on two languages other then my home verion, and in about six month will be able to do it on any version.Anders Wennersten (talk) 07:03, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Anders Wennersten, I think you missed understood the points listed about. No one is saying getting university students to edit wikipedia is bad thing. People ARE saying that having only rich students edit is a bad thing and the current proposals hugely neglect engagement with the poorer countries, their language versions of wikipedia and content specific proposals which focus on developing countries. The examples of Serbia and Ukraine as poor countries is a very subjective argument (both have high HDI scores way above most places in the Middle East, South Asia, Central America or Africa). Anyway, my point above was that there are lots of people in rich countries who know about the developing/poor world and are even personally connected with people there. I agree that the funding should go to rich countries (for now) simply because they have the organizations to use the funds but that doesn't mean WP should be throwing 1/2 a million dollars at Switzerland without requiring them to at least spend 10% on aid work or work dedicated to improve Wikipedia for poor countries. If that doesn't happen then we can be almost certain that Wikipedia will simply expand and mirror global economic inequality in terms of it's coverage of poor vs. rich countries.Monopoly31121993 (talk) 08:30, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

About five years ago a discussion along the same lines took place in the Board. Brazil and India were then selected to try to see if proper funding to support comminities in these countries could be a model to work with. Unfortunaly both thse inittives failed to get the result wanted. And basically the core of the learning - you can not work with the "push" model to get something going, we must work with the "pull" model in order to get the results we all wish for. Meaning if ther exist a active good communityr there is much we can do to sopport it get even more productive. But if there is no active community, general funding can become counterproductive, and any tendency for contributers to feel they should get finiancial reward for contributing is found to not produce the type of communities we know will thrive. And both chapters and the other type of grants are in use to help finance specific intitives for good local inititves.Anders Wennersten (talk) 10:18, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

"any tendency for contributers to feel they should get finiancial reward for contributing is found to not produce the type of communities we know will thrive." No offense, but [citation needed]. Encyclopedia Brittanica wouldn't be very popular if all their income went to the editorial staff and the marketing department, and none went to writers. When people donate to Wikiepdia, it isn't out of gratefulness that someone is making pamphlets in Ukraine, or that Wiki's ten-year-old infrastructure still crawls along. It's out of gratefulness that the mob donated volunteer hours to make individual pages readable. If money is used intelligently, it can motivate experienced editors to actually fix real across-the-board content problems, which is "the problem" with any encyclopedia. The only problem of any import. Look at en:Organization for Transformative Works, for example. They're on their way to raising $70,000 for a small volunteer community with a few permanent staff members, and once they've met their overhead and supported their basic development projects, they actually dedicate money to preserving and archiving quality fan-created content. But hey, not thriving, right? Earflaps (talk) 10:58, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Anders Wennersten, you put some words in my mouth. I never said that $6 million should be given to poor countries. What I said was that if Switzerland or any other rich country was going to get $500,000 then at least part of that money should go to developing content related to poor countries. I have no idea how many active editors there are in Switzerland but if there are 5000 (which seems like a lot) then $100 per editor is A LOT of money for them to be getting. The point I was making was that these countries should spend money on developing content related to the poorest countries. That could mean content in languages which don't get a lot of attention, it could mean adding content in French, Italian, German or English which is related to the poorest countries or it could and SHOULD mean getting people from those countries who live in Switzerland more involved in Wikipedia. Switzerland is a very international country and there are lots of people there from some of the poorest countries on earth. Swiss Wikipedia needs to get those people involved. I agree that sending money to Brazil or India (especially when they haven't applied for any money) wouldn't be a good idea. But also, no one has actually suggested doing that. What WAS suggested was to emphasize developing content related to poor countries and that remains a serious problem and neglected area in these proposals. Do you agree? and if so, what do you think should be done?Monopoly31121993 (talk) 19:40, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

@Monopoly31121993: it's always interesting to read proposals, you can find some interesting ideas there! For example, from the Swiss proposal you can find that they will spend something around $150,000 (salaries for tech + IT maintenance costs) on Kiwix, which is a kind of offline Wikipedia heavily used all over the world, most notably in Africa and India, and also used in jails of several countries. This product is essentially designed and maintained by Wikimedia CH, but it is obviously beneficial for communities in Africa or India as well. This is not, however, a direct investement in people from poorest countries seeking asyle in Switzerland (for many reasons it's not the easiest thing to implement), but you are free to submit a proposal to Grants:IEG if you want to launch a project targeting people from poorest countries living in Switzerland or any other country. We can get a real advantage from globalisation, and many chapters do include projects targeting more than one country in their proposals — NickK (talk) 03:49, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Even though my comment can be seen as negative or critical, I do not agree with all the criticism above. If the money that I donate are used to improve Wikipedia, I very much agree with that. I don't only pay for servers and to keep Wikipedia add-free. I want a better Wikipedia, but I want to see concrete, accountable proposals and results, not fuzzy proposals like those above proposals.

I am very sorry to say this but goals like we are going to support community efforts to improve the working atmosphere on the Wikimedia projects, by providing training and coaching sound scary to me. They look too fuzzy and un-accountable. Please give money only to those projects that do something that can be measured - i.e. concrete results, like more articles and better quality of the articles. Before giving them money, ask them to do 5% or at least 2% or 1% of the job for free, and then check if you can measure if they did that percent of the work. And then give them 10% of the money they ask, and ask them to do 10% of the job. Then again, see if you can count if they really did 10% of the job. And then again, give them 20% or 30% of the money and so on until the 100% will be spent.

I suggest that the proposals should come with ideas like

"create articles (or stubs) for each commune in country X (or county Y), and add at least the following things into each article: a photo, an infobox with certain fields filled, an external link to the local council, and a list of books about that commune (if they exist)"

"translate the lists in the navbox w:Template:ISO 3166 into the language X" - there are many lists like that which are important and can improve Wikipedia in various languages.

Is Wikimedia still losing editors? if so, what is the expertise of these editors? [3] Perhaps not paying directly, but somehow incentiving at a low level, more experts to really go deep into topics/areas, or even just moderating might be useful.

With the might that the Wikipedia/Wikimedia can bring to a project like making the records of our federal courts free to everyone and not be burdened by the Pacer System from the courts that charge 0.15 per page to access. There is so much pubic domain information that is behind a pay wall, which should be free and some money should be put to the effort of freeing these truly vital records to the public to make U.S. courts open to the world to see as our founders intended. Just a show of this as being a goal of Wikipedia/Wikimedia will open floodgates of money from individuals and organizations across the U.S. (Where the money is). Just give it a shot at some of the money, I would up my monthly donation if this were a goal of the site.

"Where the money is" should by no means affect "Where the money is spent". While I admire the overall goal of centralising public documents, this should be a global attempt, not one directed at the United States. Audigex (talk) 12:47, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Necessary to increase the ability to download large files in Wikimedia. Currently, you can download the file only 100 mega bytes, it is very small. Many books simply do not fit into the Wikimedia Foundation. Download them from other sites every time is extremely inconvenient. Wikimedia is a great opportunity to give a link to a specific page of this book, this is not possible on other sites. On good, should be allowed to download the halyards of 500 Mega Byte and better 1000 Mega Byte.Wlbw68 (talk) 09:08, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

It's hard, perhaps impossible, to fathom a book that couldn't fit into 100 megabytes. I have e-textbooks that are over a thousand pages long and take up 25 megabytes. If you have a book that takes up 100 megabytes, it was probably put together improperly. Some guy (talk) 19:16, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

I wrote and spoke about the books scanned, these books are very, very much on the Internet. I even had a book on a 1 gigabyte at that it is assembled correctly. Tell me, what I sense to write fiction? I am not for myself asking for money, but for the common and useful things. Give examples: [3] - 178 megabytes [4] - 769 megabytes [5] - 709 megabytes ........

And believe me, such a great variety of books.Wlbw68 (talk) 21:19, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Good health to you CristianCantoro. Here great difficulty downloading large files, neither for all browsers; this information is not available on the main page of each foreign-language versions of the Wikimedia Foundation; and even written about the fact that this program is experimental and is not working correctly. I would like to system administrators to allow more accessible and understandable for each foreign language section Wikimedia. With respect to you, Wlbw68 (talk) 10:01, 22 October 2014 (UTC).

An idea into the pot: either now or in the future Wikipedia may want to sponsor the creation of quality illustrations. Paying for content creation may be counter to the volunteer spirit of Wikimedia, but this must be weighed against the high value of illustrations and difficulty of generating quality illustrations for the majority of contributors. This may be a cost-effective approach to accelerating the long term improvement of Wikimedia in all languages. Dhatfield (talk) 18:19, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

I would argue that a bigger problem is the lack of images (illustrations included) currently available. I don't know for sure but I image having a wikipedia page that can crowdsource petitioning to institutions or private collectors to make some of their copyrighted works public would be a much easier, cheaper and possibly more effective way to get more needed images on Wikicommons.Monopoly31121993 (talk) 19:47, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Mark IX tank at the Tank Museum, Bovington. Photograph by volunteer MightyHansa, under a scheme organised by Wikimedia UK

A big part of the role of chapters is to liaise with cultural institutions in order to encourage them to release images. Either ones where they own and could release the copyright, or ones out of copyright that they could release photographs of. Some organisations like to talk to an organisation in their country, others need the sort of reassurances, explanations and even introductions to volunteers that a chapter can provide. Others need persuasion through things such as this Wikimedia UK booklet. Petitioning might be a ploy for those organisations currently opposed in principle. But it won't help those who think they can earn more money by keeping tight control on "their" images. As a Wikimedia UK employee image releases are an important part of my job. Wikimedia Commons is growing much more rapidly than the English Wikipedia in recent years and the chapters have helped this. For example several Chapters including the UK were involved in funding the GLAM upload tool - if an organisation is willing to release tens of thousands of images you don't want to just point them at software that uploads batches of 50 images at a time. Wikimedia UK successes this year include our resident at the Royal Society who persuaded the Royal Society to start releasing images of all new members. We also persuaded the Tank Museum to give us some tickets that we then offered to photographers in the community, and other members of the community identified items in the tank museum where we needed images for Wikipedia. Commons:Category:Content media by years - Supported by Wikimedia UK - 2014 has some of our recent ones. As for Dhatfield's suggestion, I'm not sure that we should be paying to create images, the cost per image would be very high compared to successful programmes with Museums and elsewhere, and yet there is still huge potential to import images from museums, art galleries and archives. Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) (talk) 14:26, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

As a photographer and Wikipedia editor who has a personal image archive of over 20,000 images of mostly historical artifacts and artwork, I would like to suggest modifying the policy of Wikimedia Commons to allow the submission of images with Creative Commons non-commercial attribution share-alike licenses instead of requiring the release of all rights (except attribution). I am more than happy to provide images to Wikipedia through Wikimedia Commons for educational purposes but do not feel Wikimedia Commons should become a freebie source of quality media for large media companies that have more than enough funds to pay for image use for their commercial products from which they reap profits. Traveling abroad to photograph historical sites, cultures or artifacts is expensive. I am more than happy to view my contributions to Wikipedia as a way to give back to my world community but megacorporations should not be able to generate profits at my expense. 63.155.170.196 17:23, 27 October 2014 (UTC) Sorry, apparently my Wikimedia login did not transfer over to this page. The comments above about allowing CC non-commercial images in Wikimedia Commons is mine - Mharrsch (talk) 17:31, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

They said free but i coudn't even add about that person as turkish or english. You also despise people as "insiginificant" or "kayda değer olamayan". Your editors deletes them quickly. Guidlines says people who make valuable works can be added. But how can they realize in 5 minutes whether if someone insignificant or not. I think its better you send this money Somali. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ula%C5%9F_%C3%96cal This page also cant be edit and forbidden by your workers. My significant works you dont know http://ulasocal.comhttp://yazilimindirtr.blogspot.com.tr

I don't know the quality of your modifications, anyway i want to stress on the fact that effectively there's a big problem on Wikipedia about page editing and experienced users deleting work of the others, i would call it "mafia" because it is indeed the better term to describe it.

We original article editors must have total control over our own articles, not taken by "hostile admin editors" who simply want credits to themselves who specifically had no first hand knowledge about the subject. I've seen works come and go because of IRRESPONSIBLE, SPECULATIVE JUDGEMENTS done by these so called "editors with admin rights " in Wikipedia. I have my own article here and i'm not finished yet then this guy "took over" my article without posting a message notifying me the reason for such action in my own article. Admin logins here have been abused now by people who wanted all credits to their name and login. They can simply use their Admin logins to remove articles without consultation to their original editors or last editors. Editors with Admin logins must be RESPONSIBLE in such a way that they notify the original editor or the last editor of the article and ask of explanation, not make drastic actions. Its a waste of bandwidth and server storage to post this but we need to be heard.

A donation of 6 Million USD in Wikipedia? It might as well go to expenses first for the maintenance of the servers, I.T. personnel and people who are behind in keeping the Wikipedia and its other related sites. Rental of place maybe, etc..Before having the funds decided to be spent in meetings where not everybody here is unable to attend these meetings! - Fowl_vet

I do believe, Sufism can do much for the global peace. It is one of the most affective Philosophies that can grow moral responsibility in the aspect of a global perception. I am working to develop cross lingual material of Sufism beyond religious and sectarian territory. Someone may, remark it as a political view but I firmly don't. Therefore, I welcome the grand committee to look forward to extend their vision to develop this sector. ---- Sufidisciple (talk) 09:58, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

I don't know that this is wiki related, but I'd be interested in learning about your movement if you would post a link.FourLights (talk) 15:50, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Why do groups suggest how they want to spend funds rather than the community decides what should get done and then we ask who can do what of this for which price?[edit]

Zero feedback from those submitting proposals as of October 23, 2014October 25, 2014[edit]

Per the invitation for comment and the background information provided (see link for more info)[[6]], comments on this page are supposed to receive a response from those who've submitted the proposals - during the comment period (which runs from October 1 - October 31, 2014). I find it interesting that there are no official responses of any of the proposal submitters to any of the comments on this page. If they feel so strongly about the importance and validity of their proposals, where is their defense to the critique (and in some cases, disdain) expressed herein? If they can't be bothered explaining why their proposal is truly worthy of the investment in the face of the resistance expressed here, it would appear to me that their project and desired funding might not actually be that important. I think the FDC will have to take such silence into consideration as they evaluate the proposals. Of course, my hope is that the FDC listens carefully to the disgust expressed on this page and rejects all proposals outright and finds a better use for the money. I'm not really expecting that, but I am indeed hopeful anyway. Vertium (talk) 03:18, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

This is indeed disappointing. I don't get the point of a community process with people asking sensible questions that remain unanswered. sebmol? 13:10, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

IMO: the whole process is to give Wikipedians the impression they can participate and, even more important, wikimedia can always say; "you can participate, but you didn't want to".

The participation is even limited to the people who feel compfortable in english. No translation at all. not even to the "main" languages like spanish, french, german, russian. nothing. an organisation who says is proud to be available in so many languages with a constant increasing million dollar budget but not able to get someone to translate it to its workers. that shows IMO how "important" the participation of Wikipedians are too wikimedia. ...SicherlichPost 15:40, 24 October 2014 (UTC) ja natürlich; es ist ein wiki. übersetz es. aber warum sollte ich. das ist hier wikimedia-bespaßung. da verdienen leute geld mit ihrer arbeit. wenn ich also für diese arbeiten soll, dann bitte auch gegen bezahlung

IMO, the lack of responses and participation is directly related to the increasing feelings by the community(s) that they have no real say in the governance of their own projects or how or what the WMF does. This has been shown by the WMF in a number of examples from the creation of the Superprotect rights to the utterly shameful release of Mediaviewer, VisualEditor, etc. Many of the communities and editors feel as though the WMF thinks they are adversaries rather than stakeholders in these processes. Now I for one have frequently advocated that the WMF be more involved in many aspects of the projects because I think the communities have shown that they lack the ability to do certain things. But if the WMF wants input from the communities on these proposals then it needs to work with the communities interactively and take their input seriously. Otherwise what we see here is the biproduct result of that negaitive interaction. Reguyla (talk) 16:33, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

The big problem is that proposals on this page are not implementable in the scope of these proposals. On one hand, organisations that have already submitted these proposals cannot submit any new projects after discussion starts, thus it is technically impossible for them to react. On the other hand, this page turned into a horrible mess of ideas lacking any practical information. Just a few examples:

Dhatfield suggested funding projects for quality images. However, most of proposals already have something similar: for example, WMUK already has such kind of partnerships with GLAM institutions, Wikimedia CH supports press accrediations for volunteers producing quality images, Wikimedia Serbia organises photo safaris etc. Thus this proposal is to a certain point included by organisations, but no one is really in position to confirm this.

Many people suggested that there should be projects targeting developing countries. Here also there are notable achievements: Wikimedia Deutschland supports Wikidata working worldwide, Wikimedia Argentina supports Iberocoop for the whole Latin America, Wikimedia CH has Kiwix which is very successful in Africa, Wikimedia Serbia has a project for Thailand, Wikimedia UK supports QRpedia working worldwide etc. Once again, there are some projects, but it's not too easy to generalise.

Vijayganesh.s1996 suggested funding projects for Tamil Wikipedia. Great idea, but a volunteer community of people speaking Tamil is needed for this: while it's quite difficult to find such people in Austria or in Sweden, while it's much more likely to find them in India. There is no use in funding a project if there are no volunteers behind (there will be no one to benefit from the grant), thus if there is a group of Tamil volunteers who need money for their great projects, they can apply to PEG programme or submit their ideas to Wikimedia India.

Those are a few examples that show that if those questions remain unanswered, it's simply because there is no one in position to answer them — NickK (talk) 21:35, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

he point was that the communities requesting the funding were supposed to respond to / react to the comments on this page. They should be speaking up, defending their (ridiculous) proposals for (ridiculous) amounts of money from WMF. No comment, IMHO, means that they either don't care what the community has to say or that they're not really interested in defending their position. In either case, their silence is cause for rejection of their proposal. Vertium (talk) 21:53, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

That's not the way it works. There are very few comments on particular issues here, most comments are general thoughts on what other people want to do. If you have a question to a particular organisation, feel free to ask it on the discussion page of this proposal (like Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round1/Wikimedia Argentina/Proposal form#Question) If you have a particular project you want to be funded and you have a group of people who want to do it but the only obstacle is lack of money, this is not the page for your ideas, you should go straight ahead to Grants:PEG which is a project for this, and no one will do this request for you. If you just have an idea but don't know how to implement it, or you just want to say that you want to fund something else (but you don't know what exactly you suggest to fund), it's not strange that you don't get an answer — NickK (talk) 12:21, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

@NickK:, you're mistaken. Have a look at the last sentence in the lede above and you'll see the following statement: "We expect that the Wikimedia organizations that have submitted these proposals will be able to respond to your comments and questions.(emphasis added). The expectation is set that those entities asking for money should be reacting to the comments made here, and clearly they're not. So, despite your assertion that it isn't the way it works, it actually is. Vertium (talk) 02:46, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

@Vertium: please read the entire lede in this case. After reviewing a proposal, please post your comments and questions on the Discussion page of the proposal. You should have posted your comments and question on the Discussion page of the relevant proposal in order to receive an answer from people behind the proposal in question. Instead, you have posted them on the main page of the review. People who have posted comments on the discussion pages have normally received answers from the respective proposals. Which means you have just raised the issue in the wrong place — and thus you did not receive the reaction you were expecting — NickK (talk) 22:41, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Once again, incorrect. There is no "feedback page" inside the proposals themselves. In fact, if you click on the proposal, it says specifically, "Do Not Edit" the proposal document. This IS the feedback page. Vertium (talk) 00:20, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

@Vertium: I have looked at your question, and by the way, you have already received a response from Sebmol: Germany alone collects 19 mln € of donations but requests only $1.576 mln. Thus it is clear that there is feedback, and you did receive the answer to your question, and I don't really understand what's the problem now — NickK (talk) 12:26, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

@NickK: great... one response, from 11 proposals. And I've already made clear what my problem is. I think it's a waste of money, and I'm no longer going to support WMF financially. If Germany is really kicking in $24million (the equivalent in dollars of the claimed amount in Euros) that would mean that Germany contributed more than 50% of all WMF revenues in 2013. I find that claim impossible to believe, and it only strengthens my argument that the German proposal is ridiculous in its magnitude. Vertium (talk) 02:46, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

My miskate, I read on table incorrectly. The plan for 2015 expects fundraising revenue in Germany of about 10.5M EUR or 13.33M USD (today's exchange rate). In comparison, total fundraising revenue in Germany in 2013 was 7.7M EUR or 9.77M USD (today's exchange rate). Regarding defending the proposal, I think I've done that by pointing out that lack of proposals coming from "underserved regions" isn't a salient argument for opposing funding of those proposals that do exist. The proposals themselves aren't useless but will effect real improvement in access to free knowledge, software quality, local community support, and more. If it were up to me, we'd spend even more on many other parts of the world. But without a community foundation there that is willing and able to execute programs locally, there's no point in denying funding to other regions where that community foundation already exists. sebmol? 10:27, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

I have no money, cause i am a useless person but I can contribute my knowledge. But I have a roof over my head to do so.[edit]

I have given money to Wikipedia every year for eight or nine years. Mostly in contributing to make it better, but every year I put a bit in the pot at the end of the year and I expect you to use it wisely. The proposals are all from rich countries who can look after themselves. I can say this without side because I have the privilege of being a citizen of one of them.

That is my proposal statement.

At the end of each year, I put a bit in WP's pot. I have read thelegal waffle, and it is bollox, because if this is not the largest community effort to spread knowledge, then it is nothing. You need money. I'd like some too. But if you lose that, you are nothing.

I don't come here for financial gain, I come here as an atheist who believes what Christ tried to say, look after your neighbour. Now, your neighbour is not in Canada or Iowa or Germany or the United Kingdom, your neighbour is the person who cannot put together a proposal and tick all the boxes'. It is no surprise the proposals are from those who know how to tick boxes, the others are making your socks.

Not every country is the United States. (Some years ago I did have at en:List of countries that are not the United States, but it was speedily deleted although perfectly encyclopaedicc.) I edit Wikipedia to feel that I am contributing to others' knowledge with what I know and what I can find out. I am lucky. I may have to walk an hour in the rain to save a train fare, when I go to get cat food, but I have a roof over my head and i am warm and dry when I get home, to my own safe and secure home, and I have a happy cat. And a happy wife.

It probably doesn't mean to seem this way, but "How do we spend $6m" sounds like you won the lottery. That came from people who cared abut Wikipedia. It is not a trifecta. How you spend it, in my opinion, is making it better for editors to make it better for readers. That means investing in translators (as has been said), software engineers (as has been said), redundant servers (as has been said) and forgetting to think you are the United Nations. By the way, if you want to employ a translating, redundant, software engineer, I shall serve! Day rates please! :)

Best wishes, may it continue but don't splash it. Save it for infrastructure, and if you have any left over, send it to me, I need a new pair of shoes. If I can live on $5 a day after all exes so can you. The slippery slope less travel'd by will make all the difference: WP will pay me for how much I write or how much it is read. If that happens, it's not WP any more.

Vandalism is a plague in many Wikimedia projects (mostly the Wikipedias): it's time-consuming and energy-consuming. It has a very discouraging effect in many editors, who see their hard work being shredded so easily. Of course vandalism can be undone, but each improper edition will be forever there, recorded in the database. What for? Vandalisms don't have any real didatic value for the readers...

If we check the whole Wikimedia databases, I bet hundreds of terabytes are being occupied by these junky editions made by vandals: we - the real editors - undo these vandalisms on a regular basis, but vandalism keeps coming because there are no strong and effective counter-measures being taken against it: only IP and account blocking, which is quite easy to bypass by creating another account or using another IP.

The only good use I can think of the act of keeping these vandalisms on record is in order to use these records as good forensic evidence that the person X behind an specific account or IP did practice vandalism and hence must be sued in order to compensate Wikimedia for the misuse and harmful use of the resources that were provided to this person.

Wikimedia may not get too much money from donations, but if it fights against vandalism it will spend less money with hardware resources, and the real editors will have more time and feel more animus and encouragement to go on editing.Sampayu (talk) 04:03, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

On English wikipedia there are 2 very well-known long-time vandals; JarlaxleArtemis and Runtshit. Death-treaths are common from JarlaxleArtemis, while Runtshit sock-puppets go into 4 digits now. I believe WMF knows the identity of both these people, (the first in California, the second in Israel), and I support any legal action WMF would do against them. Huldra (talk) 10:22, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Definitely these folks should be legally charged. As well as we have vandals and criminals on the physical world, we do have vandals and criminals on the internet - and they're causing damage no matter where they're taking action. Hence, they must be held legally accountable for their actions.Sampayu (talk) 20:41, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia is cool on undisputed/-able facts, like e.g math ... and, to say the least, not-so-cool on political themes. Having seen the page of RolandR (and not knowing the least about that "RuntShit", apart from him/-er being an apparent proliferator of sockpuppets) High-Five to the latter! DO NOT ever spoil donation money to further the works of the juridical caste. As "Philadelphia" has it: "A good start"!!!!! DocMJV

As we know Wikipedia project is electronic type of encyclopedia! So it bases on books and other kind of literature. As I am, a photographer ambrotypist, I think that electronical encyclopedia should base on real photo materials like negatives or positives. In my country, I am one who takes photos on wide format camera. About me, I only can say that in the future I am going to take several shots with my camera and upload scans in Wikipedia common. If you think that, my work is enough it’s your right!.--Surprizi (talk) 07:05, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

My proposal: use funds to give money to poorer communities without internet[edit]

I propose that this portion of funds be donated over to nonprofit organizations, and Internet Service Providers in smaller, rurural areas that do not have internet access. This gives them an opportunity to actually use Wikipedia, but in order to complete the goal of Wikipeda, knowledge must be made avaible to everyone, not just those with internet access. Perhaps use the money to go into printing many more volumes of Wikipedia (to spend 6 million on printing for Wikimedia projects would mean a very distributed print) Superdadsuper (talk) 14:41, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

@Superdadsuper: Printed Wikipedia is a waste of paper, as printing 4 million articles will take some dozen million pages, thus with $6 million we will print just a few copies, having spent all money on paper. On the other hand, Wikimedia CH invests in solution called Kiwix which provides offline Wikipedia for people having computers but having no Internet. Wikimedia Foundation also heavily invests in Mobile and Wikipedia Zero, solutions for free-of-charge access to Wikipedia from mobile devices in developing countries, and investment in these projects are from another budget line, not from the $6 millions mentioned here — NickK (talk) 15:47, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

To put this in context, just to bring broadband to underconnected and rural areas of Europe €9.2 billion were asked.[7]

Concretely, how would you proceed to enhance internet access, something like w:Project Loon? --Nemo 07:44, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

We should provide Internet and basic necessities to Africa and equatorial reqions first, as human potential is most undeveloped there - the resources/benefit ratio will be the highiest there!
Equatorial (and tropical) regions has the highiest photosynthetic productivity, and highiest acceleration to launch spacecraft - providing knowldge to people there will be most fruitfull!
And, we need to tell more about water crysis in Africa (Latin America, Indonesia, etc.), and how corporations wipe dark-skinned people out of land and genocide them... Knowledge and means of communications are best defence for people - to tearn desert into blooming fruitforests, and increase equatorial black population!
--Yegor Morozov (talk) 11:17, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

I think it would be fair to allow donators to choose what their money would go into. For example, they can add a comment option in the donation box for the admins to see. --Wiki-asd-97 (talk) 17:00, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Support This is a good idea. I would suggest a model in which 50 % goes to community projects and 50 % to a project chosen by the donator. --Furfur (talk) 21:45, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Support as it is in generell a good idea. ...217.255.16.200 22:28, 26 October 2014 (UTC) still I think its going to work out. 3 points:
1.) Its easy to cheat the system meaning to shift expenses from one project to an other.
2.) WMF is not even brave enough to tell the donators where the money really goes. now giving them the chance to tell where to spend it?
3.) what to do with the millions of dollars when the donators tell you to spend it on hardware to keep wikipedia alive as in the begging for money is always to read? laptops for the top 1.000s editors and still money left :o)

Support Yes, at least by category (projects, infrastructure, improvement in the editor, improvement in the screening and training of admins (including the desysopping of those who are abusive), etc. Much better idea than accepting donations to "keep WP free from ads", when they're rolling in enough money to waste it on projects like those proposed here. Vertium (talk) 02:49, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Support Indeed, that would be the best thing to do. It would be fantastic is every person could choose the proposal that they want to see done. In the end, every problem/proposal would be realized according to the amount of money people had donated. Tuga1143 (talk) 12:11, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Support Although the only way I can see this working is with it as a suggestion system, so that donations could be accompanied by suggestions (this would also quantify expectations, which would help with expectation management) - this would need to be made clear for avoidance of problems. But as mentioned above and elsewhere on this page, potentially not every request could be honoured. Used correctly, it could also generate suggestions for where to target fund-raising on both contemporaneous and future donation drives - for instance, if a lot of users suggest minority-language focussed projects, then some future banners could also be accompanied by details of projects that users are helping to fund. As an aside, it could also generate early suggestions for these very grant proposal pages. Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 18:07, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Hello. My name is Mr. Snrub, and I come from some place far away. Yes, that will do. Anyway I say we invest that money back in the nuclear plant. Mr. Snrub (talk) 18:43, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Are you really writing in English? The instructions clearly say "you can comment in your own language" so what you wrote may or may not need translation in order to be in English. Breedentials (talk) 15:12, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that this is a Simpsons-based joke (see en:Marge vs. the Monorail - 'Mr Snrub' is Mr Burns' pseudonym when he's trying to get the money from his fine back). Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 17:34, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

I would suggest to use some funds to speed up solving the issue of the non-visibility of categories and navigation templates in mobile views and apps. This would be of great added value. Wiki-uk (talk) 16:25, 27 October 2014 (UTC)